China’s Baidu has developed a new chatbot, Ernie, which is capable of processing large amounts of language content and generating responses. The chatbot is part of a trend in Chinese technology companies to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve dialogue systems. Tech industry expert Jeffrey Ding has noted that censorship of certain words or phrases has not slowed the development of such models. However, it is thought that the content used to train bots may have already been curated by the Chinese government’s censorship regime. Ernie Bot is currently only available to a limited number of users, some of whom are impressed with its performance. Meanwhile, comparisons with the popular ChatGPT chatbot show that Ernie Bot is capable of handling Chinese idioms and answering questions more accurately. ChatGPT is blocked in China, but people are finding ways to access it.
Better caution for the language is required by China’s ChatGPT competitor. (86 characters)
